Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Wednesday

Several good ones today! All free - All legal!

Fiction
• At The Colored Lens: "An Archivist of Leaves" by
Brenda Stokes Barron. "But Abigail didn’t notice any of these things until she’d slipped
through the veil into the Dark Forest. She didn’t notice until the dense trees
had swallowed her whole."

• At Daily Science Fiction: "Beyond
the Gate" by Terr Light. "Through the boundary I could see shadows of people walking,
lingering for a moment, gathering into a crowd and then moving on. Today's crowd
was bigger than yesterday, and I was certain each person could see me as plain
as day"

• At Hub: "Tourists" by Emma
Newman. "He watched his cousin at the door of the hotel, dressed in the
crisp uniform and sweating in the heat. He didn’t care what his father made them
do. He just thought of the money and said only the stupid ones fell for
it."

• At Lightspeed: "Child-Empress
of Mars" by Theodora Goss. Science Fiction. "In the month of Ind, when the flowers of the Jindal trees were in
blossom and just beginning to scatter their petals on the ground like crimson
rain, a messenger came to the court of the Child-Empress. He announced that a
Hero had awakened in the valley of Jar."

• At Lightspeed: "Purity
Test" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Fantasy. "My feet are scraped and bleeding, my slippers shredded and almost
useless. The dress hangs in tatters around me. No longer white, it still bears
the pearls along the bodice, and I hope I can keep them close and sell them in
whatever town I find myself in. Provided I find a town. Provided I ever leave
these woods. I have traveled for two days, surviving on puddle water and
berries, hoping that the sounds I hear behind me aren’t my father, Roland, and
the dogs."

• At Nightmare Magazine: "The
Ease With Which We Freed the Beast" by Lucius Shepard. "Me and Molly Bruin were lying on our stomachs atop a sea cliff
overlooking Droughans Beach, fresh from a [. . .] and lolling there, our skins
stuck with bits from the weeds and tall grasses that cloaked our sin, with the
wind in our faces and our lives yet to be lived."

• At World SF Blog: "On
the Feast of Stephen" by Cyril Simsa. "The thing that hadn’t occurred to me—the thing that hadn’t
occurred to any of us, when we set off into the woods—was that, what with the
history of migration in Central Europe, we couldn’t be sure whose warrior was
sleeping where, or whom we would end up summoning."

Audio Fiction
• At Clarksworld: "Effigy
Nights" by Yoon Ha Lee. \ "The city lies at the galaxy’s dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon
that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain
anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a
bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies
stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged
starships."

• At LibriVox: The
Nibelungenlied by Anonymous, translated by Daniel B. Shumway. Epic
Fantasy. "The Nibelungenlied is an epic poem in Middle High German. The story
tells of dragon-slayer Siegfried at the court of the Burgundians, how he was
murdered, and of his wife Kriemhild's revenge."

• At Ministry of Peculiar Occurances: "Positively
Shocking" by Tee Morris. Steampunk. "Constance Magee is not a street urchin, not a thief, not a lost
soul in the street of London. She is a girl surviving Her Majesty’s Empire one
day at a time, nursing a sense of right and wrong, And sometimes, that sense
doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with the law."